Episode 47: No Other Land (2024) (Guests: Omer Bartov & Lisa Hajjar)
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No Other Land (2024) is the Oscar-winning documentary that shows the brutal destruction of a Palestinian community in the occupied West Bank. Recorded between 2019 to 2023, the film tells the story of Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist, who has been protesting the Israeli army’s destruction of homes and eviction of villagers. Adra is assisted by Yuval Abraham, a Jewish Israeli journalist. (They are also two of the film’s four directors). To Adra and other Palestinians, the Israeli army is destroying their homeland. The Israeli army, however, maintains that the inhabitants are on land that the military needs for live-fire military training and that the evictions have been duly authorized by Israeli courts. The situation turns violent—Adra’s cousin is shot by Israeli soldiers in the days after the Oct 7 attacks—and Adra himself is endangered by his efforts to record the evictions and protests. The film provides a penetrating look not only at a Palestinian community in the West Bank but also at the plight of those being forced off their land--with literally nowhere else to go. [Editor's Note: Since the recording of this episode, Odeh Hathalin, a Palestinian activist and contributor to the film, was shot and killed in a village in Masafer Yatta by an Israeli settler.]
Guest: Omer Bartov
Omer Bartov is the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. Born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony's College, Oxford, Professor Bartov's early research concerned the Nazi indoctrination of the Wehrmacht and the crimes it committed in World War II, which he analyzed in his books, The Eastern Front, 1941-1945 (1985), and Hitler's Army (1991). Professor Bartov has also written about the links between total war and genocide, including in Murder in Our Midst (1996), Mirrors of Destruction (2000), and Germany's War and the Holocaust (2003). Professor Bartov’s more recent work has focused on interethnic relations in the borderlands of Eastern Europe, such as in Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (2007) and Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018). Professor Bartov’s most recent book is Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis (2023). He is at work on two other books, Israel: What Went Wong? and The Broken Promise: A Personal Political History of Israel and Palestine.
Guest: Lisa Hajjar
Lisa Hajjar is professor and chair of Sociology at the University of California -- Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on law and conflict, including war crimes and other gross violations of international law, military occupations and courts, and legal activism in pursuit of justice. Professor Hajjar is the author of numerous publications, including Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza (Univ. Cal. Press, 2005), “International Law and Fifty Years of Occupation” in Aaron Hahn Tapper and Mira Sucharov, eds., Social Justice in Israel/Palestine: Foundational and Contemporary Debates (Univ. Toronto Press, 2019); and “Law against Order: Human Rights Organizations and the Palestinian Authority,” 56 University of Miami Law Review 59 (2002). Her most recent book is The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture, published by University of California Press in 2022. In her work, Professor Hajjar often compares Israel and U.S. violations of international law and the forms of legal reasoning government lawyers concoct to “legalize” illegal policies and practices.
Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
3:42 Masafar Yatta and the Occupied West Bank
7:43 The legal apparatus of illegal occupation
13:14 The “Gazafication” of the West Bank
20:08 The meaning of “No Other Land”
23:21 Israel and the international community
31:24 The crackdown on free speech in the U.S. and in Israel
34:41 A complex story of an Israeli-Palestinian friendship
41:18 The power of images
43:07 Growing Israeli indifference to Gaza and the West Bank
48:30 The film’s reception in Israel
49:53 Law-based criticism of Israel and antisemitism
Further Reading:
Bartov, Omer, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It,” New York Times (July 15, 2025)
Beinart, Peter, Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (2025)
Caplan, Neil, The Israel-Palestine Conflict: Contested Histories (2010)
Hajjar, Lisa, “International Humanitarian Law and ‘Wars on Terror’: A Comparative Analysis of Israeli and American Doctrines and Policies,” 36 Journal of Palestine Studies 36 (Autumn 2006)
Kaufman, Anthony, "No Other Distribution: How Film Industry Economics and Politics Are Suppressing Docs Sympathetic to Palestine and Critical of Israel," Int’l Documentary Ass’n (Jan 15, 2025)
Khalidi, Rashid, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (2020)
Lukenville, Mackenzie, “The Only Path Forward: ‘No Other Land,’” Int’l Documentary Ass’n (Dec. 5, 2024)
Sfard, Michael, Occupation from Within: A Journey to the Roots of the Constitutional Coup (2025)
Publication Date
8-12-2025
Disciplines
Law
Recommended Citation
Hafetz, Jonathan, "Episode 47: No Other Land (2024) (Guests: Omer Bartov & Lisa Hajjar)" (2025). Season 03. 1.
https://scholarship.shu.edu/law-on-film-s03/1
